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How does Rage fit into Id’s history? Bethesda attempt to explain in a new video, which you can see below. There’s some new Rage footage, but also footage of a bunch of classic Id games, providing a bit of perspective on where Id went after Wolfenstein. The video has Carmack, Hollenshead and others doing a bit of talking, and there’s a crumb of insight on the megatexture tech, and how that will – apparently – be exploited properly in Rage.

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To me, Rage just looks like Borderlands with less character. The environments/enemies/weapons/vehicles have the same look & feel to them (sans cartoony rendering, obviously).
I’m sure the tech is awesome, but what will it really mean for the game? How will it make Rage better, or even just comparable to Borderlands?

EDIT: Also, how many times can they mention John Carmack in one video? We get it…

The ‘borderlands’ styling is a throwback to the Max Max films of the 80’s, so neither games are being original in that respect, in fact Rage looks to have ‘learned’ a lot from Fallout. I also think Rage went into development before Borderlands was even announced.
I think Rage is going to be far more immersive that Borderlands (and I love the latter game as well) the NPC bots look absolutely awesome!

Well the title of the video is “Legacy of id”. And really, that’s unarguably their biggest legacy. I mean some muppet’s inevitably going to come in here spouting about how “Wolfenstein wasn’t the first FPS”, and to an extent that’s true, but id effectively crafted the genre into the form that it’s in today. The fundamental ideas and concepts, the multiplayer architecture and effective genesis of the online FPS scene. Massive support for modding. Engine licensing. And then those aspects continued to evolve through the Quake franchise as well.

Really, you can’t get much more important than that when it comes to id. It’s not like Commander Keen made a huge splash.

There’s a chance that it won’t have creepy dead-eyed people like Borderlands did?

This is not a Gearbox insult, they did a good job with it, but it’s something I’ve noticed in every UDK game ever. The facial expression/morphing technology absolutely sucks. I spotted this first in Mass Effect (no insult to Bioware), and I’ve since seen it in the Gears of War games, and just about every other game that uses UDK as its base and tries to have even mildly expressive characters.

Borderlands looked like Action Figure Land™ because of it and that really put me off. I was forced to look away at some points of the facial close-ups in Mass Effect 2 because I didn’t want to be exposed to dead-eyed Shepard who stared through people rather than at them. The crew of the Normandy all looked like they were doped up on something, probably an inability to animate the eyes properly, but they all looked like they had some sort of lazy eye syndrome.

I reeeally dislike UDK facial technology. So if there’s one thing Id has a chance of doing better then it’s that. Things don’t seem to have improved much in UDK 3.5 either, to be honest, as Bulletstorm suffered with the same problem. Bulletstorm was a pretty fun game, I’m with TotalBiscuit on that, but I still can’t get away from how empty the characters looked, it’s like they were only half alive, and it’s a UDK thing. This is something that Source gets right (see: Facial animations in the likes of TF2.) that the UDK hasn’t even begun to yet.

So one area where this could do better than Borderlands is facial animations. Perhaps this won’t have half-zombified characters that scare the hell out of me.

Looks deeper and more realised han Borderlands. Borderlands felt more like a turbo-developed game that wasn’t what it was originally envisioned, but kind of rushed out the door when they ran out of money for future development.

Hey did any of you other guys notice that games that are in the same general setting and aim for a well-established aesthetic tend to share visual features? I know, it’s pretty shocking. I mean, I keep on seeing all these “science fiction” games that contain lots of shiny metal and powered armor and a preponderance of blue and silvery hues. Have you looked at the cutscenes in Starcraft 2 and Mass Effect? They have similar visual elements! It’s really weird once you start noticing it!

Oh and this is even wilder — some games share both the same general visual and gameplay style! There’s this game called Modern Warfare 2, came out two years ago, that has a bunch of scenes set in dusty, brownish, Middle Eastern urban areas where you shoot men from the first person perspective with modern high-tech rifles. And I just saw a trailer for this game “Battlefield 3″ which has the same stuff in it. They’re basically the same game!

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Fallout 3 is an open-world RPG. Borderlands is a Diablo loot game married to a (weak) shooter with a heavy multiplayer focus. Rage looks like it is a single-player-focused, story-driven pure FPS.

If you made a list of “games similar in gameplay to Rage” and ranked them, Borderlands wouldn’t be in the first 100 and Fallout 3 wouldn’t be in the first 5,000.

“Really, you can’t get much more important than that when it comes to id. It’s not like Commander Keen made a huge splash.”

At the time, Commander Keen was huge, because it was one of the few PC games at the time that proved that PC games could look as good as the consoles. (Remember: these were the days when the standard amount of memory that came with your computer was less than a megabyte.) When CK came out, a lot of successful homebrew/shareware games were still being made with ASCII or CGA graphics. But also at the time, “successful” meant a hundred sales or so of something developed by one programmer.

Then CK comes along and really pushes the limits of EGA graphics. Fast scrolling, high framerates, (relatively) fast character movement with smooth animation, and huge variety of levels and character designs. It was the first Id game to have an engine licensed out to third parties.

Commander Keen was actually quite special. It doesn’t seem as special because it was revolutionary. But would there be so many Dopefish cameos in so many games if it wasn’t so special?

We now take it for granted that our desktops have better graphics than the latest Nintendo console, but originally it was the other way around. Commander Keen was one of the very first games to change all that.

Everytime someone says this, I find it extraordinary that in those 23 years since id became a brand that there’s people who haven’t seen a single video where it was pronounced. Really, it’s not surprising that you’d think it was called eye dee, because most people don’t know about Freud’s theories, but that you somehow managed to never see a single piece of video, a single soundbite, anywhere, ever, where they said it. THAT is impressive in this day of information video spam.

I had actually been pronouncing it the Freudian way from the beginning but then a friend told me off for pronouncing it wrong (around the time Quake 3 went gold). So ‘Eye-Dee’ it was for several years until I saw John Carmack’s keynote at the Apple WWDC in 2007 where he showed the world id Tech 5 for the first time. I felt simultaneously vindicated and like a total idiot.

I took that to mean they were trying to avoid the re-use of the same visual spaces re-dressed with a slightly different internal layouts and different enemy distributions, the first example of which I can remember was the original Halo; some of those levels were maddening for how repetitive they were. Go play Quake and tell me how many of those environments are reused from one part of a level to the next, or from level to level. Even Doom 3 worked hard to try and make their levels visually different despite being part of the same complex.

I’d like to ask the same.
This is probably to “get in the mood”, but what about their eyes?

After I saw the all horror depicted in doom3, I can’t stop thinking that there are some people in there that are almost sick. Can you imagine texturing a corpse for hours in that dark room, with reference pictures?

Yes, well, at least it’s pretty common. The offices I’ve worked in and interviewed at often have a dark area for the artists.

Artists are very picky about colour, and ambient light can make judging colour accurately hard.

We often find it quite a conflict – artists want the office like a cave and the coders would like a bit more light! At my last company they were perpetually taking light bulbs out of the ceiling lights to make some areas darker than others.

It’s complicated by the use of cintiques which are pointing generally towards the ceiling, where there are often rather bright lights!

They’re really pushing the tech front (and so Carmac), rather than the actual game. All I know so far is its got guns, cars and Megatextures (which I’m sure have been around for a while- ET Quake Wars?). I’d be more interested to see how open the world is, oh and potential for stealth. Right now I’m imagining it as a slightly more restricted STALKER, which is no bad thing.

I liked every Id game. Doom 3 was my least favorite but it was a decent core game with nice visuals and a couple of cool ideas spread too thin amongst a 15-20 h campaign. I really think rage is going to be great just because the actual fighting is going to be a lot of fun. A lot of fpss allow them selves to get into gameplay ruts.

The animations looked weak – the throwing knife seemed to be a soft, floaty throw which then flips a dude over sideways, and the characters still seem to talk to you in pose-pose-pose-pose rather than a flowing animation. The character shading looked blotchy. Most of the environments were corridors and the “unique visual style” was a whole lot of monochromatic areas. The much wanked about vaunted tech of Megatexture just looked like heaps of decal maps.

I never though I’d say this about a new Id engine game, but it’s looking pretty mediocre in the graphics department. Not very impressive at all.

I do like the way the core shooting gameplay looks, though. The animations and overall presentation of the guns shooting and guys being shot is top-notch. I guess that’s to be expected from Id, but it sure is nice looking regardless.

At around the 4 minute mark, Carmack quips, “We are arguably the best looking game on the consoles today and the point is we are running at two times the framerate [60FPS] of what other people might argue is the best looking console game.” Was that a dig at Battlefield 3??? (Not that it really matters to us PC folk, but…)